The Long and Faraway Gone

by Lou Berney

  Wyatt lay in his hotel bed, almost fully awake but not quite yet, and remembered the night after he and Theresa first had sex. Everybody at the pool, the stars above. This was an apartment complex they’d been chased from before, so Grubb’s boom box was turned low—­Run–D.M.C.’s Raising Hell, which O’Malley had picked up at Rainbow Records in exchange for a movie pass.

  Melody wanted to hear some Prince. Karlene complained that her skin always smelled like popcorn. She said that when she finally got to Hawaii, she was never going to go near popcorn again. Theresa did a handstand underwater. Her long hair billowed around her head like dark liquid. O’Malley suggested that they could torment Mr. Bingham by unscrewing the peephole in the office door and reversing it. They would be able, O’Malley said, to watch Mr. Bingham like he was a fish in an aquarium. An ugly fish, Karlene said. A stupid fish, Grubb said. Janella said Mr. Bingham might be stupid, but even he would eventually figure out that the peephole had been reversed. O’Malley agreed but said it would be fun while it lasted.

  Wyatt didn’t know which side of grief was worse. The feeling that these ­people had always been in his life and were now gone or the feeling that they’d never really been there at all.

  Theresa had climbed out of the swimming pool, sleek and glittering. Janella handed her the bottle of whiskey. Theresa took a sip and carried the bottle over to Wyatt. When she sat down next to him, when she rested her head against his shoulder, everyone stared. Grubb almost fell off the diving board. Wyatt tried to be cool. He took a long drink and counted the stars.

  He knew that O’Malley was watching him. Wyatt took another drink and glanced over. O’Malley arched an eyebrow and gave Wyatt a nod of approval.

  “Well done, Heinz,” O’Malley told Wyatt later, when the sky was turning gray in the east and they were all straggling back to the cars. “I can always say I knew you when.”

  That had been, possibly, the best moment of Wyatt’s life. The best moment of the best night of the best year of his life. The only year, he sometimes felt, of his life.

  Now his alarm went off. He knocked back a ­couple of painkillers—­his knee looked like an exotic overripe fruit you’d buy at an Asian market—­and called Dixon, Lyle Finn’s manager.

  “Oh, man,” Dixon said when he answered, “you really scared the shit out of Lyle last night.”

  “I need the names of all the groupies who hang out at the warehouse.”

  “He won’t tell me what happened. What happened? He said it was the worst Halloween since he was twelve and his mother told him he was too old to go trick-­or-­treating anymore. I’m not making that up.”

  “Can you get me their names?”

  Silence. “I don’t need to call a lawyer, do I?”

  “No,” Wyatt said. “I think you were right about Lyle. I don’t think he’s got anything to do with it. But I need the names. First and last. I need to run background checks on everyone.”

  “Okay. Sure. It could take me a day or two. They kind of come and go.”

  “That’s fine. Thanks.”

  Wyatt hung up and dialed his contact at the Daily Oklahoman.

  “What?” Bill Haskell said.

  “Bill,” Wyatt said, “this is your old friend Wyatt Rivers, the private investigator.”

  “What do you want now?”

  “Nothing. I’m taking the morning off and want to pay my debts. How about I buy you breakfast?”

  Haskell grunted skeptically, but he was a newspaperman—­a free meal was a free meal.

  “Cattlemen’s,” he said. “Twenty minutes. It’s down in Stockyards City. You need the address?”

  “I’ll find it,” Wyatt said, and waited for Haskell to grunt skeptically again. He did.

  Wyatt got dressed and jumped on the Lake Hefner Parkway. He hadn’t been down to the stockyards since he was nine or ten years old, a school field trip. Stockyards City drew a few tourists, but it was also a working livestock market, gritty and authentic in the way Bricktown, with all its frat-­rat bars, wasn’t. Down here you could buy a wide-­brim straw Stetson at Shorty’s Caboy Hattery or, on auction days, a few hundred head of Angus.

  Cattlemen’s was an old steak house on the main drag, a ­couple of blocks from the maze of holding pens. At eight in the morning, only the diner side of the restaurant was open. Paneled walls, blood-­colored leather booths, the rush of bacon grease and black coffee when you stepped inside—­a time-­traveling cattle buyer from 1950, from 1930, would feel right at home.

  Wyatt had no trouble recognizing Bill Haskell. He was the heavyset guy at the counter, suspenders and a breast pocket full of pens, a tight, tiny mouth like the beak of a snapping turtle. Only the absence of an old-­school felt fedora disappointed Wyatt.

  Haskell glanced over when Wyatt sat down, an action that took more shifting and squinting and beak snapping than Wyatt would have thought possible. Haskell was a little younger than Wyatt had expected—­mid-­sixties.

  “You’re late,” Haskell said.

  The waitress filled Wyatt’s coffee mug. He glanced at the plastic menu.

  “Biscuits and gravy,” he said. “Two eggs over easy and a side of bacon. No, make that sausage patties. No, make it bacon and sausage both. And a paramedic standing by.”

  Haskell gave a curt nod. Wyatt had passed the test.

  “A place like this,” Haskell said, “you don’t order granola and yogurt.”

  Wyatt’s phone rang. Chip. Wyatt put the phone back in his pocket. He took a sip of coffee and looked around. “So what’s the story with this place?”

  He knew the story but suspected that Haskell would relish the telling of it.

  “Opened 1910, three years after statehood,” Haskell said. “In 1945 the owner, Hank Frey, got in a dice game at the old Biltmore Hotel downtown with a rancher named Gene Wade. Frey bet his restaurant against Wade’s life savings that Wade wouldn’t roll a hard six. A pair of threes. Wade rolled them and won himself a restaurant.”

  “Now, that’s a story,” Wyatt said.

  “Oklahoma has a fascinating history. Bloodthirsty Comanche war parties. Ruthless outlaws who fled to the Indian Territory to escape the long arm of the law. Wildcatters and gamblers, boomers and sooners. You might be surprised to learn that Oklahoma City is the final resting place of the man who killed the man who killed Jesse James.”

  Wyatt hadn’t really been listening until then. He glanced up from his coffee.

  “The man who killed the who?”

  “That’s exactly how the headstone reads. Sic erat scriptum. ‘The man who killed the man who killed Jesse James.’ Edward O’Kelley. He’s buried in Fairlawn Cemetery on Western Avenue. Jesse is spelled incorrectly, with an ‘i.’ ”

  The waitress brought their food. Haskell had ordered a bowl of granola and yogurt.

  “My daughter wants me to live long enough to play with my grandchildren,” he said. “So she claims. I come here for the memories.”

  “And the smell.”

  “And the smell.”

  Haskell measured out exactly half a teaspoon of sugar and tipped it into his coffee.

  “Tell me something, Bill,” Wyatt said. “Do you remember those killings that happened at the movie theater way back when?”

  “Of course I do. The old Pheasant Run Twin in the old Pheasant Run Mall. My wife and I went on one of our very first dates at that theater, right after it first opened. Logan’s Run. The theater closed immediately after the crime, the mall shortly thereafter.”

  “Were you on the story?”

  “I wasn’t one of the lead reporters. No. But it was all hands on deck. I covered the OSBI press conferences. I spent more time sleeping on the sofa at OSBI headquarters than I did in my own bed.”

  “The police, the OSBI, they decided the killers got into the theater because an employee neglected to lock one of the b
ack exit doors. Correct?”

  “One of the theater ushers. Correct. If memory serves, he left the door ajar when he took the garbage out.”

  Haskell had finished his granola and yogurt. He studied his empty bowl. He looked hungrier now than when he’d started eating.

  “And the killers snuck in,” Wyatt said. “That was the only possible explanation. There were no signs of forced entry. The front doors were locked.”

  “If memory serves. Yes. You know, one of the killers used a gun loaded with bullets called wadcutters. That’s always stuck with me. It’s odd, the details one remembers.”

  Wyatt took a ­couple of bites of his biscuits and gravy and then pushed the food around on his plate. He tried to look at the evidence with clear eyes, a skeptical head. There was the possibility that Grubb, when he came back inside after dumping the trash, had failed to pull the exit door all the way shut. But really that wasn’t a possibility. The exit doors were designed to swing shut and lock on their own—­that’s why you had to prop them open. And anyway, the doormen always yanked the doors shut behind them, always, as hard as they could, because the boom annoyed the shit out of Mr. Bingham. It was a central pleasure of the job.

  The only other entrance to the theater was the glass front doors that led from the theater to the rest of the mall. And Mr. Bingham was a fanatic about locking those as soon as the last customer was gone. Wyatt had watched him do it a million times. Two different keys on the ring, one for the top dead bolt, one for the bottom. Snap. Snap.

  The locks were security double dead bolts. The front doors were glass. So even if the killers had tried to pick the locks, they would have been completely exposed the entire time. The only way the killers came through those doors was if they had their own set of keys. But if they had their own set of keys, how did they get them? Was it possible the killers had an accomplice the police knew nothing about, someone who worked at the movie theater but hadn’t been there when the robbery went down?

  An inside man.

  Haskell eyed Wyatt’s plate. Wyatt nudged it toward him. Haskell selected a strip of bacon.

  “If you insist,” Haskell said.

  “I have a favor to ask, Bill,” Wyatt said.

  “Gambling in Casablanca? I’m shocked.” But Haskell helped himself to another strip of Wyatt’s bacon. He removed, from his back pocket, a spiral reporter’s notebook almost identical to the one Wyatt carried. “What now?”

  “Do you know any of the investigators who were on the movie-­theater case?” Wyatt said. “OSBI or OCPD. Someone I could get more information from.”

  Haskell glanced up. Surprised. “What’s this have to do with your Land Run case?”

  “I’m just curious,” Wyatt said. He had the lie all lined up and ready to go. “I think there might be a book in it.”

  Haskell grunted. “Just what the world needs.”

  “Another writer.”

  “If you have a day or two, I can share my own bitter experiences with the publishing industry.”

  “Don’t make me beg, Bill.”

  Haskell helped himself to Wyatt’s last strip of bacon.

  “Carl Friendly was killed in the Murrah bombing,” he said. “He was the lead investigator on the OSBI side. Jack Siddell with the OCPD died a few years ago. His heart. A surprise to all who knew him, that he had one. Randy Plunkett. No. Let me think.”

  Wyatt didn’t remember Carl Friendly or Randy Plunkett. The only detective from that time he remembered with any clarity was Jack Siddell. The acne scars, the cold, hoarse voice. Jack Siddell, who’d demanded to know why Wyatt thought he was still there and all the others gone. But who also, once near the end of the investigation, after Wyatt had been unable to identify the three dead killers, hesitated at the door on his way out. Maybe Jack Siddell didn’t have a heart, but he’d met Wyatt’s father, he’d met Wyatt’s mother. He’d been there to see Wyatt painted with the blood and brains of his friends.

  “You can’t think about it, son,” he said. “It won’t do you any good.”

  Why am I still here and all the others gone?

  “Think hard, Bill,” Wyatt said. “Who can give me the inside skinny on the investigation?”

  How late was too late to move on with your life? What if, after all these years, there was someone—­an inside man—­who might be able to answer the question Wyatt had been buried beneath for the past twenty-­six years?

  “I suppose Brett Williams might be willing talk to you,” Haskell said finally.

  “Can you set it up for me? Pave the way?”

  You would have thought, from how Haskell grunted and sighed and tightened the beak of his mouth, that Wyatt had asked him to hoist both Sisyphus and boulder upon his back and carry them up the hill.

  “I suppose,” he said.

  WYATT PICKED THE public library on Villa—­the Belle Isle branch, just a few miles from the Pheasant Run Mall, on the opposite side of the neighborhood where he had grown up.

  A librarian showed him to the dusty old microfiche readers. Wyatt sat down and loaded the first reel of film. The librarian lingered.

  “You know,” she said, “the Oklahoman archives are all digital now. Most ­people do it that way.”

  “In this particular instance, Becky,” Wyatt said, “I’m not most ­people.”

  He waited until she left and then spun through the first seven months of 1986. Yes, digital would have been more efficient, but he wanted as much of the full newspaper experience as possible—­the original dot-­screen photos and smudged ink, the widows and orphans, the crooked jump columns.

  He reached the issue of Friday, August 15, 1986. The day of the robbery. The big front-­page news that day was that the city council had annexed land for a new water-­supply line.

  At the back of the sports section—­beneath the much larger schedules for the multiplexes, down next to tiny ads for the Blue Moon Saloon strip club and the Bombay Wig, Costume, and Lingerie Shoppe—­were the show times for the Pheasant Run Twin theater.

  One Crazy Summer, with John Cusack and Demi Moore. The Fly, with Jeff Goldblum. “Bargain matinee half price every show 4–6 P.M.”

  Wyatt had to spin two issues forward, to August 17, for the first article on the massacre—­the pre-­Internet world, when news wasn’t news yet if it happened after the paper had been put to bed for the night. The initial coverage took up the entire front page of the Daily Oklahoman. A photo of the Pheasant Run mall ran above the fold, photos of the victims below it. Grainy high-­school-­yearbook shots of O’Malley, Theresa, Grubb, Melody, and Karlene.

  The photos looked nothing like them. Grubb, his hair parted on the side, a grave expression, could have been the president of the chess club. Theresa, who never smiled, was smiling. O’Malley, who always smiled, wasn’t. Melody, the photo taken before she’d discovered cornrows, looked like a young Donna Summer. Karlene wore glasses.

  They all looked so unbelievably young, like children. Wyatt wondered why the newspaper hadn’t been able to find more recent photos.

  The photo of Mr. Bingham was the only one that truly captured its subject. A candid shot. He wore a short-­sleeved dress shirt and looked only a little less sour and puckered than usual. He held something in his arms—­a bag of groceries, maybe—­that had been cropped out of the picture.

  Wyatt spun through issues of the Oklahoman until he found what he was looking for. In early October, a day after the killers had been gunned down in Arizona, the newspaper ran a double-­truck spread that included a wide-­angle photo of the theater’s back parking lot. The auditorium exit doors were the focus of the shot, but you could see the Dumpster in the background—­you could see, clearly, that the Dumpster was angled toward the building, no longer parallel, just the way Wyatt remembered. Grubb would have seen the killers approaching.

  So. Say there was an inside man. Say someone ga
ve the killers the keys to the theater, someone the police didn’t know about.

  Who? As far as Wyatt knew, only Mr. Bingham had keys to the glass front doors. The mall security guards didn’t. Mall management didn’t. The movie theater operated under a special lease—­it was a sovereign tenant, the self-­important term Mr. Bingham liked to use. The Vatican City of the Pheasant Run Mall.

  The janitors didn’t have keys either. They had to wait every morning until Mr. Bingham arrived to let them in.

  The question, then, had to be this: Who had access to the keys? Who could have borrowed or stolen them and had copies made?

  Mr. Bingham kept all his keys on a single ring—­the key to his office, the cash box, the ticket boxes, the projection booth, the cabinet where he locked the movie poster one-­sheets, the glass front doors. Those and a dozen others. The crew always joked about it, how the weight of the keys in Mr. Bingham’s pocket dragged his pants down, how he was constantly pausing to hitch them back up.

  Almost always, he kept the keys with him. Almost always. During an extra-­hairy weekend rush, when Mr. Bingham had to work the box office so Karlene or Janella could help out in the concession stand, he’d stash his keys in the drawer beneath one of the cash registers. That way the girls wouldn’t have to bug him every time they needed to make a run to storage for napkins or straws. Sometimes the keys stayed in the drawer for thirty or forty minutes at a time.

  Was that long enough for someone to grab the ring of keys, make copies, return them? No. But you wouldn’t have to take the entire ring—­you could take only the keys to the front doors, which Mr. Bingham probably wouldn’t notice missing until the very end of the night. You’d have to figure out a way to get the keys back on the ring. You’d have to plan for a particularly busy weekend, when there were three different rushes, at six, eight, and ten. Take the keys at six, make copies during your break, put the keys back on the ring at eight or ten.

  Maybe. It wasn’t implausible.

  Wyatt took out his notebook. He wrote down the name of every theater employee who had not been working the night of the massacre.